Informfully Platform

Welcome to Informfully (GitHub & Website)! Informfully is an open-source research platform for content distribution and running user experiments.

The platform allows you to push algorithmically curated text, image, audio, and video content to users and automatically generates a detailed log of their consumption history. It is a domain-agnostic and platform-independent solution to fit your specific needs. The platform was designed to accommodate different experiment types through versatility, ease of use, and scalability. It features three core components:

• a front end for displaying and interacting with recommended items,
• a back end for researchers to create and maintain user experiments, and
• a simple JSON-based exchange format for ranked item recommendations to interface with third-party services.

To view the full documentation, please visit Informfully at Read the Docs. It is the combined documentation for all code repositories.

Links and Resources: GitHub | Website | X | Documentation | DDIS@UZH | Google Play | App Store

Note: Our GitHub repositories allow you to run your own instance of Informfully. If you would like to use Informfully, a cloud service hosted at the University of Zurich, please contact us. Free demo accounts available upon request: info@informfully.ch

Informfully Preview

Find out more in the Online Documentation and create your own instance by deploying the Platform Repository.

Installation Guide

This project was bootstrapped with Create React Native App. In case you need more information about React Native, the most recent version of this guide is available on the official GitHub repository.

The following installation instructions provide an abbreviated version to help you get set up quickly and ready. You can access the full Platform documentation here.

Download the Code

Informfully is a React Native app that uses Meteor servers as a back end. Download the code and Meteor as follows:

# Download the source code
git clone https://github.com/Informfully/Platform.git

# Install all packages
cd backend
meteor npm install

After you have downloaded the code, you need to verify the React Native Packager Hostname. We have a small guide for Mac, Linux, and Windows. Find more on Installation Instructions in the documentation.

Run the Code

Once everything is downloaded, simply run the back end and connect it to the front end. You can then start the server with:

# To run the server on port 3008
# Settings configured for the development environment...
./meteor-start.sh

# ...and...
bash meteor-start.sh

# ...or by specifying --port directly to run the server with
meteor --port 3008 --settings settings-dev.json

Make sure that you are specifying the same port for the back end that you are using in the React Native App. Find more on Local Development in the documentation.

Deploy the Code

After development and testing your instance of Informfully, you are ready to deploy your solution. For your convenience, we have created a script that automatically deploys the back end to any local or cloud server. Navigate to the main directory of your codebase and execute the following script:

# Deploy back end on the server
bash build.sh

Deployment of the front end is done via Google Play for Android and XCode for iOS. Find more on Back End Deployment and Front End Deployment in the documentation.

Download the App

Test versions are available for download if you'd like to take a quick look at the app. Reach out to us to get a demo account: info@informfully.ch

Android (v5.1 and newer)	iOS (v13.0 and newer)

Citation

If you use any code or data from this repository in a scientific publication, we ask you to cite the following papers:

• Informfully - Research Platform for Reproducible User Studies, Heitz et al., Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, 2024.

  @inproceedings{heitz2024informfully,
    title={Informfully - Research Platform for Reproducible User Studies},
    author={Heitz, Lucien and Croci, Julian A and Sachdeva, Madhav and Bernstein, Abraham},
    booktitle={Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems},
    pages={660--669},
    year={2024},
    publisher={ACM New York, NY, USA},
    url={https://doi.org/10.1145/3640457.3688066}
  }

• Deliberative Diversity for News Recommendations - Operationalization and Experimental User Study, Heitz et al., Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, 813–819, 2023.

  @inproceedings{heitz2023deliberative,
    title={Deliberative Diversity for News Recommendations: Operationalization and Experimental User Study},
    author={Heitz, Lucien and Lischka, Juliane A and Abdullah, Rana and Laugwitz, Laura and Meyer, Hendrik and Bernstein, Abraham},
    booktitle={Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems},
    pages={813--819},
    year={2023},
    publisher={ACM New York, NY, USA},
    url={https://doi.org/10.1145/3604915.3608834}
  }

• Benefits of Diverse News Recommendations for Democracy: A User Study, Heitz et al., Digital Journalism, 10(10): 1710–1730, 2022.

  @article{heitz2022benefits,
    title={Benefits of diverse news recommendations for democracy: A user study},
    author={Heitz, Lucien and Lischka, Juliane A and Birrer, Alena and Paudel, Bibek and Tolmeijer, Suzanne and Laugwitz, Laura and Bernstein, Abraham},
    journal={Digital Journalism},
    volume={10},
    number={10},
    pages={1710--1730},
    year={2022},
    publisher={Taylor \& Francis, UK},
    url={https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2021.2021804}
  }

Collaboration

Do you want to use Informfully, but there is no infrastructure available for you to use? Informfully can be used as a hosted service. We offer to collaborate with you in your scientific experiments and provide you with access to the research infrastructure.

Feel free to reach out to us: info@informfully.ch

Contributing

You are welcome to contribute to the Informfully ecosystem and become a part of our community. Feel free to:

• Fork any of the Informfully repositories.
• Suggest new features in Future Release.
• Make changes and create pull requests.

Please post your feature requests and bug reports in our GitHub issues section.

License

Released under the MIT License. (Please note that the respective copyright licenses of third-party libraries and dependencies apply.)